WARNING: Anyone with a T-1616 listen up!

So, I got this machine in 2007, and so far, every hard drive I have put in it has died. The original one died, sent that back within factory warranty, it got replaced, bada bing. Also of note after the machine returned from the factory repair shop the DVD drive died, so they shipped me a new one, then I sent the old one back. 6 months later, out of warranty, the replacement hard drive dies. I go to best buy, buy a new hard disk, and use that for about 3-4 months. It dies. I buy a 500 gb drive off newegg. In less than FIFTEEN DAYS, it died (got the bootup message SMART Failure Detected), and I have to RMA it with Newegg.

As of recently, the DVD drive has been refusing to read discs also, sounding like a floppy drive when it reads a bad disk.

Am I unlucky, or is this laptop just crappy?
I'll be on the phone with Gateway tomorrow to see what can be done about this peripheral killer.

 

It depends. I've had several hard drives in a row die on me before. It's not common, but not unheard of. In my previous Dell laptop, the DVD drive, HDD, and battery all died within 3 months of purchase (new from the Dell online store). It happens some times.
There could be other causes, but considering yours are so far apart, I think a voltage problem or bad motherboard can be ruled out.
My advice is, I'd just look into getting a new system and getting rid of the gateway at this point. The fact is, now that you're out of warranty, it could be very costly to get your gateway fixed, probably more than it's worth.

 

I have a T-1616 from 2007. I still have the original Hard Drive. There is a driver for Vista that that fixes Smart Hard Drive fail warning problems. Maybe you should try that. I have 4gb 800 memory and just installed Vista 64 bit over this weekend...it really is fast now. Only issue with 64 bit is you can't put it to sleep. Just have to shutdown-restart.

I can't find where I saw it now, crap...Try calling Gateway and tell them you need that driver. I was searching for 64 bit drivers and saw it somewhere

Hope it helps.

 

Here is a fix from Smart Drive Failure is..........HP that is for Hitachi Hard Drives:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...&dlc=en&cc=us&product=3439463&os=2093&lang=en

don't know if will work but it's worth a try

 

Problem is it didn't actually tell me it failed, there were physical signs of failure (i.e clack, clack noises from the drive, failed reads, short reads)

This happened on all 4 drives I've had in the machine (Original, Warranty Replacement, Best buy, and newegg)

So I'm pretty sure it's not a firmware issue.